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Luise Rainer

Largely forgotten for over fifty years, Luise Rainer arguably is as notable for her meteoric rise to stardom in 1930s Hollywood as she is for her subsequent obscurity. Born in Vienna, Austria, on January 12, 1910, she had already achieved acclaim on the European stage and screen in her twenties. She arrived in Hollywood amid a wave of European artists, writers, scientists, and other intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution. A protégé of the legendary Max Reinhardt, German theatrical director and fellow refugee, she played in her most memorable roles opposite William Powell in The Great Ziegfeld (MGM, 1936) and Paul Muni in The Good Earth (MGM, 1937). Her performances in these films earned her both raves and an unprecedented two successive Oscars. As part of the gallery of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer luminaries, she also helped define the studio’s reputation as the “Tiffany” of motion picture companies in Depression-era America.

Within three years, however, Rainer’s career had vaporized almost as quickly as its success had taken shape. Columnist Louella Parsons diagnosed Rainer with what the influential Hollywood reporter called the “Oscar curse.” For her part, Rainer considered Hollywood superficial and largely devoid of ideas. Eschewing the glamor images of female stars promulgated through studio publicity, she was known to go without makeup and dress in comfortable old clothes. She reportedly even came to the 1936 Academy Award ceremonies several hours late, and with her hair in disarray. Although MGM touted her as the next Garbo, her subsequent roles typecast her as an obedient, supportive spouse. In both The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth, Rainer had played a long-suffering, indefatigable, and loyal wife to celebrated impresario Florenz Ziegfeld and a Chinese peasant, respectively. Roles featuring stronger, more independent women eluded her. In a 1988 interview, for example, she told People Weekly that she attempted to convince MGM to give her the role of Marie Curie, the French scientist eventually played by Greer Garson in 1943. While a succession of undesirable studio-imposed roles and a disastrous marriage to playwright Clifford Odets have been proffered as explanations for the quick demise of Rainer’s career, the roles that had garnered Rainer such acclaim quickly became anachronistic. As the Roosevelt administration prepared the country for war, encouraging industry to usher women into a burgeoning wartime workforce, the image of the obedient, long-suffering wife appeared increasingly out of step with this new social reality. Today, one of Rainer’s greatest roles labors under condescending ethnic stereotyping as well. However compelling, the performances of both Paul Muni and Rainer offer the uncomfortable reminder that Asians and other minorities were largely visible only through stereotypes rendered by white actors and actresses.

In offscreen life, Rainer hardly fit the image of the lachrymose heroines she often portrayed. Along with Odets, Rainer joined other Hollywood talents as a part of the Popular Front, a broad-based coalition of leftist political activism that emerged out of Los Angeles during the 1930s. She served as one of the founding members (along with Muni, journalist Dorothy Parker, novelist and playwright Lillian Hellman, actress Gale Sondergaard, and other Hollywood notables) of the Motion Picture Artists Committee and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, organizations devoted to the cause of Republican Spain against the totalitarian forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

With the collapse of the Popular Front by the late 1930s and her divorce of Odets in 1940, Rainer increasingly eluded public view. Her last Hollywood film, Hostages (1943), received a lukewarm reception despite its timely depiction of the World War II underground resistance movement. Rainer then virtually “disappeared” from the Hollywood scene, though she continued to make infrequent guest appearances on American television throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including an episode for the thriller anthology series Suspense (“Torment,” March 30, 1954) and opposite silent film star Ramon Navarro in the World War II series Combat (“Finest Hour,” December 21, 1965), in which she plays a sympathetic countess. In 1988, she appeared in “A Dancer,” a short film produced for Italian television. Having married publisher Robert Knittel (d. 1989) in 1944, she was living in London and Switzerland at the time, the same year in which People Weekly interviewed her for the sixtieth anniversary of the Oscars. Ten years later, she was a featured guest at the 1998 seventieth anniversary Academy Award ceremonies.

At about the same time, the octogenarian Rainer appeared in her first major film release in nearly fifty-five years. The Gambler, a Hungarian/English “story within a story” that weaves the Dostoyevsky tale of the same name with a story about his writing of it, premiered in Europe in 1997 and opened in the United States in 1999. One critic described her performance as “radiant one moment, bereft the next, so feverishly animated that you cannot take your eyes off her.” Appearing in yet another film in 2003, Luise Rainer— whose ninety-five years have spanned everything from Jewish refugee to glamorous Hollywood star—is an inspiring reminder that it’s never too late to return for the “second act.”

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Christoph Busch9 years ago

It is certainly not true that Luise Rainer was born in Vienna. In a movie dictionary I read that she was born in DÌÄå_sseldorf as daughter of a merchant from Hamburg. I listened to her voice on radio. She did not have any Vienna accent.

On German radio, Luise Rainer said in 2006 that she did not see herself as a Jewish refugee in America. It was by chance that her career as an actress took her there in 1935, similar to the non-jewish Marlene Dietrich a few years earlier.

Marlene's political awareness awoke in America under the influence of her husband and other men. That is what her daughter Maria Riva (living in New York) said in her memoirs. She said that, without her husband, Marlene might have become a Leni Riefenstahl. In Luise Rainer's case, it seems that her political engagement lasted only as long as she was married to her first husband, whereas with the second one she retired into private life.

So, maybe there is a similarity. Maybe both are examples for German women of their generation, who were not yet ready for an political position of their own.

It is a pity that Luise Rainer did not play any role in German cinema or TV after 1945 while other German-Jewish emigrants returned for working there very successfully, for example the unforgotten Elisabeth Bergner and the wonderful Lilli Palmer.